Brands and the Digital World

 

Here are some of the effects of the digital world on brands:

 

• A brand’s online presence can improve brand awareness.
• A brand’s website is critical to the perception of that brand because most people investigate a brand by going to its website.
• Blogs can create thought leadership and emotional connection for a brand. But consistent new content over time is required to activate these effects.
• If a picture is worth a thousand words, then videos are worth ten thousand words. Consider creating a YouTube channel for your brand.
• For thought leadership, consider podcasts too.
• SEO is still important.
• A third (older) to a half (younger) of people investigate brands through social media before they purchase. 
• Advertising in social media makes it easier for people to become aware of and try new brands, including brands that could not break though in the analog world because of lack of marketing funds. This, to some degree, levels the playing field for smaller brands.
• More and more product offerings are delivered through social media feeds.
• Low follows, likes, views and shares can reflect negatively on a brand.
• If you are just starting with your brand’s online presence, use Facebook and Instagram first. 
• Consumer targeting is significantly improved through Facebook and Google ads. Data analytics can result in highly targeted or even tailored product offerings to individuals.
• Brands would do well to set up pages on Facebook and Instagram as a way to interact with customers.
• The Internet provides many forums for people to provide feedback on brands, including negative feedback. It would behoove brand advocates to monitor as many of those forums as possible and respond as appropriate. It is important to respond as quickly as possible.
• Online forums can increase consumer engagement with brands.
• The Internet leads to greater brand transparency, but skilled marketing can also make a brand seem bigger or more popular than it actually is.
• Marketing automation can generate quality leads.
• Marketing automation makes it easier for people to respond to offers without prior awareness of the brands behind the offers.
• One needs to be extremely careful about how the marketing automation is set up or it can backfire on the brand. This is very similar to how automated telephonic customer service can backfire on the brand. 
• Geofencing can encourage immediate purchase when a consumer is near a retail outlet. 
• Geofence in the places that your target customers are at the times when they are there. Think this through carefully 
• Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, Venmo, PayPal and Amazon’s 1-Click Ordering make it easier for people to purchase things online with fewer clicks.
• The online presence of brands makes price comparison much easier, which can drive down prices or at least direct the consumer to the cheapest source of the brand.
• Online clothing brand sales are still tricky. Several approaches have been implemented to help with sizing and visualizing the clothes when worn but there still are issues with tactile qualities of the fabric, quality of the construction and fit. This may lead to more returns for online purchased clothing brands than store purchased clothing brands.
• The younger the consumer, the more everything is transacted on the smart phone. All brand interactions must be optimized for mobile. 
• To some degree, the digital world has made people more savvy and cynical about brands, mostly due to increased transparency.

Marketing Automation and the Human Factor

Today, much of a marketer's work is related to digital marketing and marketing automation. Considerations include choosing the right CRM, setting up automated sales funnels and drip email campaigns, linking online databases, making sure autoresponders are working properly, creating Google ad campaigns, feeding Facebook pages with the appropriate content, making sure the website is mobile optimized, setting up meta tags and other SEO, using Google analytics and setting up other data analytics. Much of this requires the evaluation of different software solutions and the linking of different software components and plug-ins.

All of this can be quite time consuming and distracting. But where is the human element in all of this? Does the customer get to develop a relationship with your company or brand? Is there an emotional connection? Is there a human being they can call upon? Do they really feel heard?

This is why television advertising still makes sense for many brands. And this is why front line customer service is so important. People want to interact with other humans, maybe not all people and maybe not all of the time, but certainly most people and at least some of the time. Admittedly, some people prefer the convenience of using ATMs over interacting with bank tellers. But others still prefer to interact with a person even if it means waiting in line in the bank's lobby.

Yes, we want everything to be scalable and we are enticed to replace people with automation. And organizations usually want to pay the customer facing service employees as little as possible because there are so many of them and the organizations want to maximize their profits.

But where does that leave our brands and us when emotional connection is largely removed from the process and the few points of human contact are overworked and underpaid (and often undertrained)?

The sole point of this post is to encourage marketers to not undervalue television advertising, videos, personal selling, technical support, customer service and other sources of personal interaction. While Walmart no longer does this, why do you think they employed store greeters for so many years? And guess what they replaced the greeters with? Higher paid "customer hosts" with more stringent hiring criteria and expanded responsibilities.

Again, do what you need to do with marketing automation but never forget about the human touch.

The Limits of Marketing (and Customer Service) Automation

In the past few years, I have used marketing automation extensively for my own business and I have interacted with marketing automation from many other businesses. While there is the argument that marketing automation enables one to market 24/7, even when one is sleeping, there are also some cautions that should occur regarding this technology.

First, technology should not completely replace human interaction, which allows for emotional connection. If one uses technology independent of human interaction, it will be more difficult to make or close a sale and it will be virtually impossible to create customer loyalty based on that emotional connection. You must carefully integrate your marketing automation with human interaction.

Second, older people would rather talk to other people, not read FAQs, click through predetermined menus, "press one for...," fill out forms, receive auto responses, etc.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, many companies are not fully competent at designing their marketing automation systems. They don't turn off a prospect email drip campaign when the prospect turns into a customer, leading to confusing or annoying email messages. Or they present the customer with an automated cost estimate that only allows for an "accept" response with no ability to ask questions, discuss or partially accept the estimate.

I have encountered companies that have put me on multiple email streams based on how they coded me on their systems. Because of this, I am inundated with multiple email messages a day from these companies. I have also encountered a couple of companies for which "unsubscribe" only turns off one email stream, not all of them. I find that I have to repeat the "unsubscribe" request multiple times until I am actually unsubscribed from all of their email streams.

Then there are faulty executions of older automated telephone customer service approaches, which can be quite frustrating. Some systems don't mention your need in their menu of choices, forcing one or more of a few things to happen - choosing an option that may get you to the wrong person, putting you into a continuous loop of scrolling through the options again and again, or worst of all, hanging up on you. Another problem is when one system sends you to another system, for which you need to reenter your name, account number, password, PIN, telephone number or payment method.  People don't like to have to do this more than once, and the best CRM systems, if programmed correctly, can eliminate the need to do much of this even once.

Marketing automation and customer service automation are here to stay but don't overestimate their ability to make a sale for you or build your brand. And don't underestimate their potential to annoy your customers.

The best systems are carefully constructed with sophisticated filters, triggers and decision logic. And they provide for human interaction at critical points throughout the process. I have encountered too many systems that are poorly constructed, with the potential to damage the brands they were designed to help.

So be very careful when designing your marketing and customer service automation systems. They are useful tools but need to be carefully designed.